Comment by lolc
2 days ago
Yeah why is 10% success bad? What is the tradeoff between spent effort and missed cures if we try to tweak the success rate by killing prototypes earlier in the pipeline? While reading I was expecting a reasoned argument... that was stubbornly not coming around.
It's mostly that we have too many false findings pre-clinical trials, most drug targets validated in models that don't actually hold up in humans, so a huge share of the 90% failure is money and years spent testing candidates that were never going to work. That inflates the number of potential candidates that are likely wrong, due how we select them.
There are ways used right now that are working towards reducing those false findings by looking at actual humans, their biomarkers and whenever or not there's an associated molecule to the condition that we would like to pass onto others. It will not kill prototypes, instead it will discourage us from going through a prototype at all by going for better candidates instead.